I stand on topof our back steps and breathe the rich air--...a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.She jabs her wedge-head in a cupof sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,and will not scare.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

For character too is a process and an unfolding ... among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too sel...f confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protruberent there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle, I leave the village politics and pers...onalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Unfortunately, nearly all the "sights" in America fall under the head of conditions. Hollywood, Reno, the sharecroppers' homes in ...the South, the mining towns of Pennsylvania, Coney Island, the Chicago stockyards, Macy's, the Dodgers, Harlem, even Congress, the forum of our liberties, are spectacles rather than sights, to use the term in the colloquial sense of "Didn't he make a holy spectacle of himself?" An Englishman of almost any political opinion can show a visitor through the Houses of Parliament with a sense of pride or at least of indulgence toward his national foibles and traditions. The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner's visit to Congress--these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner's visit to Congress--t...hese, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine. They are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic a...nd acute, cold and heat and famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralisation and disorder on the part of the inferior ... jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »